CCBIO Seminar December 11, 2025 – Luiza Mihaela Ghila

Speaker: Luiza Mihaela Ghila, Researcher at the Department of Clinical Science, Medical Faculty, University of Bergen.

Title: Cell plasticity in bladder urothelium
Chair: Carina Strell
Place: Auditorium 4, BB-building (external link)
When: December 11, 2025 at 14.30-15.30

No registration necessary. 

Ghila's research aims at studying the molecular switches acting as regenerative or cell-plasticity breaks by actively maintaining the cell fate, thereby ensuring the strict regulation of cell identity and/or numbers.

Currently, her group is focusing on metabolic and immune players, which they recently identified to be involved in the emergence of the immediate neoplastic transformation signature in a model of bladder cancer. They intend to resolve the causal relationship and contribution to mechanisms regulating cell fate and tumour development by abolishing or augmenting their impact, with the final goal of aborting early neoplastic transformation.

Abstract: Tumors have a high degree of diversity, with different clones exhibiting distinct treatment responses due to a wide range of cell fate alterations causing partial or total resistance. Therefore, there is a great pressure for finding new strategies aimed at identifying measurable markers, which can predict the tumor development. 

One approach is characterizing the initial stages of oncogenic transformation, which allows the identification of tumor-initiating processes before the inherent clonal selection of the aggressive clones. In our group, we are using genetic cell tracing, global proteomics, biopsies, organoids and immunofluorescence to dynamically map the very early stages of cancer initiation (e.g. before the macroscopic/microscopic disease identification) in a mouse model of bladder cancer and/or patient biopsies. In the disease model, we reported a very rapid incremental proteome dysregulation, characterized by changes in the energy metabolism, proliferation and immune signatures dominating the landscape. The changes in the lipid metabolism were immediate and defined by an increase fatty acid metabolism and lipid transport, followed by the activation of the immune landscape. Moreover, we observed a tilt in the energy balance towards increased glucose metabolism, probably characterizing the cells of the tumor microenvironment. The observed proteome signature changes were persistent, being retained and sometimes intensified or diversified at further stages.